Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 305
of metaphysical entities so characteristic of the Middle Ages-as well
as the most enduring.
They have, of course, changed a great deal over time. Medieval corporations
owned property, and they often engaged in complex financial
arrangements, but in no case were they profit-seeking enterprises in the
modern sense. The ones that came closest were, perhaps unsurprisingly,
monastic orders-above all, the Cistercians-whose monasteries
became something like the Chinese Buddhist ones, surrounded by
mills and smithies, practicing rationalized commercial agriculture with
a workforce of "lay brothers" who were effectively wage laborers,
spinning and exporting wool. Some even talk about "monastic capitalism."171
Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in
the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize
themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de
facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade. An excellent case in point
was the Society of Merchant Adventurers, charted by King Henry IV
in London in 1407, who, despite the romantic-sounding name, were
mainly in the business of buying up British woolens and selling them
in the Flanders fairs. They were not a modern joint-stock company,
but a rather old-fashioned Medieval merchant guild, but they provided
a structure whereby older, more substantial merchants could simply
provide loans to younger ones, and they managed to secure enough of
an exclusive control over the woolen trade that substantial profits were
pretty much guaranteed. 172 When such companies began to engage in
armed ventures overseas, though, a new era of human history might be
said to have begun.